AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Australia's first pulp science fiction magazine, Thrills Incorporated published stories of low literary quality. Many were written to order and the stories were accompanied by advertisements for sex-education books, suggesting a target audience of teenage boys. In his introduction to Australian Science Fiction Index 1925-1967, Graham Stone (q.v.) makes the following assessment of the collection of books and magazines of which Thrills Incorporated was a part: 'At their worst, publishers neither knew nor cared what Science Fiction was all about or what readers expected, and yet they somehow expected the suffering public to support their miserable apologies for magazines.'

Hemming, Australia's first serious female science-fiction writer, found Thrills a particularly fertile ground: barring a single short story in Vertical Horizons (April 1952) the magazine was almost the sole output for her fiction between October 1951 and its final issue in June, 1952, in what Sean McMullen calls 'a very strange and murky interlude' in her career.

In McMullen's analysis, Hemming was 'the only "serious" SF writer' to contribute to Thrills, which put her in an awkward position:

Their house writers--including Hemming after issue 16, October 1951--had to write to formula, but she must have done her work well as her stories appeared in every subsequent issue. Hemming trod a fine line between being too intellectual for the publishers and too facile for the reader.

Hemming's stories included three of the 'cover stories' that dominated the magazine after the change in publishers with issue 13: 'Amazons of the Asteroids' (issue 17, Nov. 1951), 'Peril of the Sea Planet' (issue 22, May 1952), and 'Rocketeers at Bay' (issue 23, June 1952).

Notes

Issues 2 and 3 of Thrills Incorporated were republished in England as issues 1 and 2 (the only issues) of Amazing Science Stories in March and April 1951, with the content supplemented by some additional stories from the April 1949 issue of Super Science Stories.

PeriodicalNewspaper Details

Subtitle:

At head of cover title: Adventures in Space and the World of Tomorrow.

Subtitle:

In addition to the primary sub-title, a shift in the magazine's format with issue 13 (when the magazine changed publishers) saw the primary title moved to a banner running along the bottom of the front page, while the primary title space was taken by the title of the lead story. In effect, the final eleven issues each had a unique sub-title: issue 13 'Suicide Satellite', issue 14 'Marauders from Mars', issue 15 'The Man From Tomorrow', issue 16 'Planet of Fury', issue 17 'Amazons of the Asteroids', issue 18 'Kidnapped in Space', issue 19 'Operation Space-Freeze', issue 20 'Goddess of Space', issue 21 'Outcasts of Planet J', issue 22 'Peril of the Sea Planet', issue 23 'Rocketeers at Bay'.

Frequency:

Monthly, but irregular. No issues appeared in December 1950 or in February, March, July, or December 1951.

According to Sean McMullen, artists for Thrills Incorporated included Ray Cavanagh (q.v.), including covers and illustrations for issues 13 and 17, and Stanley Pitt (q.v.), who provided the covers and most internal illustrations for issues 21 and 23.